Month: October 2021

By M Leahy. I can’t quote from it, nor detail the procedures used in composition, because I’ve lost the book, which I haven’t finished yet. I like how the poems do at times demand you read them via the compositional procedures, and how this at least gestures at the rest of the work.

Form for me is how to read.

The difficulty I have with it is trying to identify the whole, what I am reading the poem for; the relation of each identified fragment to all the others. I would suggest that is found in the failure of the voice.

What is ‘voice’? If we think of “voice” in these poems as variations in the difficulty of identifying fragments, procedures etc., by the reader, then, as that means voice intrinsically involves form, this collection may be seen as a continuation of Pound’s project.

We may then consider Pound’s poems in terms of their superficial aspect, identified in The New Sentence, of fragments formed incoherently, that is around the need to identify their source, and Pound’s poetry as formally a poetry of voice.

I read this collection as a continuation of that, one in which the deeper coherence to quotation, a hermetic order or critical appropriation of the original, does not really exist: the voice fails because it is just voice.

Read next to Pound, this is an interesting deconstruction (it seems Leahy intended it to be “sounded / performed / read in that present without inclination back to a source / origin or forward to a conclusion / resolution”).

by Maggie O’Sullivan.

Is it a coincidence that my two favourite recent collections are about lapwings? I assume not entirely, though this was written 2005-2013.

A perplexing book, with moments of beauty, which are not limited to the sense of the lapwings escaping her language. I like e.g. in the poem ‘continuance’ (which is in pink there)

‘saying it over’ – ‘you make me say it over’

which I like as a fabricated reflexivity on her apparent need for musical closure in the first – title – poem in the collection; Billy Mills refers to how “visual and audio aspects of the work exist in parallel, separate but complementary”.

The visible sound of the poem is complete – closed – to itself.

The poems seem strikingly varied, despite how, for me, every line or group of line would be semantically consistent in any poem. And this despite the strength of the line, which really works for me as energetically dissolved content, evidenced by both the supple etymology and the defamiliarization of words by the fragmentary – highly visual – shape of the poems.

Just how good the collection is may depend on the lurking figure of Charles Bernstein (whose ‘Asylum’ is referred to in the notes). I would say she sufficiently repeats an enactment of his performance, especially in relation to the ‘shamanic’ (which comes up in contemporary discussion of innovative poetry) and his promotion of Hannah Weiner’s poetry.

It’s difficult to piece together, but that is certainly not necessary to enjoy its aesthetic (and incidentally it is a large – a4 – colourful hardback, by if p then q)

Paired with ‘Flesh Rays’ in a (print on demand) publication by if p then q, ‘Daytrain’ is a fairly short collection of prose poems of around 10-20 lines, which seems quite a conventional length in conetmporary poetry; the last poem is the shortest, at 7 lines. It is more difficult than ‘Flesh Rays’, which I could happily read without understanding: ‘Daytrain’ is horrible if you’re not here for meaning. Which is pretty instructive about how we construct poems: they work very well if and only if you can put the effort in. Perhaps that is because the language is neither fresh nor tired, how Holloway does not seem to care, at all, about novelty etc., more about fitting as many smart observations as possible into each poem.

E.g., the fifth poem, Iron Fills, begins “Film catching fire in summer, water bringing in the rain, the effort to assimilate is overtaking the precision of the capture these afternoons spent tightening air”. As with each sentence, I am forced into working out which words shouldn’t be read literally. Given the title, one might go with ‘bringing in’, rather than either noun in the phrase, in order to paraphrase it as: ‘filming fire, but wanting rain, the film, like the air, is unfocused’, making for something reaching toward a lush expansiveness (Holloway often seems to be writing on writing, in a broadly speaking Steinian way). Clearly, ‘air as film’ creates a semantic nexus, probably centred on ‘water bringing in the rain’ and a sense of uncomfortable humidity. I don’t have the skill necessary to add much to that, though ‘fills’ reminds me of musical talent, and, if I were to research what exactly was going on, I’d start with the steel industry; steel contains both iron and carbon. So the first sentence reads like an honest expression of powerlessness. The next sentence is about painting (and is not in need of figurative interpretation) and ‘light’, and rewards my analysis with a dynamism, before the third short sentence (the new sentence uses sentence length as torque): “In London some are extremely well”. There is a clear allusion to Ed Dorn’s turbine in the first poem, so it seems safe to claim that Holloway is drawing in many of his political issues into the poem.

My problem with this series is just how heavy it is and in need of work, cf something like The White Stones by Prynne.

These blocks of prose text are formally unapologetic, and a part of me wishes for line-breaks.